Shades of Nothingness

by Gary Fry

  The inked path had run across the front of the page, revealing the location of the ten installations Peter and Patricia had been told about after arrival. However, when the trail reached the edge of the map, it didn’t cease; it continued over the page, just as the physical path ahead of Peter wound deeper into sprawling woodland.

  And after unfolding the page, Peter noticed that the locations of three more art installations had been marked on the other half.

  The pen that had sketched this new part of the exhibition might well have been the same, but the hand wielding it appeared irascible, like that of a child forced to do something he or she didn’t wish to do. Each of the new displays was indicated by a big circle, and Peter reckoned it would be straightforward to locate these extra works. He’d already decided that it was too soon to go back and confront his wife. Experience had taught him that Patricia needed time to achieve a sense of perspective, to see the issue they’d been debating from his point of view. After all, she knew as well as he did on which side her bread was buttered.

  Peter glanced up and began heading for the wood’s darker reaches. It was getting on for late-afternoon and the sky above the inter-locking branches overhead looked like a blue-green shell, as fragile as a human heart. From up ahead, Peter heard something moving, but maybe that was just a trick of the acoustics in the area, because then he thought something stirred to his left—a bulky, headstrong figure, determined to overtake him. He was put in mind of his final glimpse of Patricia, before turning and leaving. In his shaken mind, however, his wife had been transformed into an animal, hunting the earth with predatory stealth…

  Peter shook his head with confusion and moved on. Just because he was alone and relying on a map, there was no reason to feel like the solitary schoolboy he’d once been, the apple of his strict parents’ eyes, and eager to succeed in life as a consequence of his stunted height and so many aggressive peers in his neighbourhood. If these early experiences had led him to become a little domineering as an adult, what was the harm in that? He’d done well for many others in the process: provided jobs for innumerable louts and lasses; supported his sons through the anxieties of childhood; offered his wife enough tacit encouragement to enjoy life, despite his own dishonourable lapses of fidelity…

  While considering what crazy Geraldine might be doing this weekend down in Sheffield, Peter spotted the first of the final three artworks.

  There was nobody else this deep in the wood. The artist who’d set up the new display had obviously done so quickly, leaving it to its audience’s mercies. Peter stepped forwards, approaching from the right-hand side. It consisted of a table perched on a patch of compressed earth. On top of the table stood a few half-full pint glasses and beside them was a packet of cigarettes. After moving closer, however, Peter noticed that something was wrong with the cigarettes. He wasn’t a smoker himself, but even so he could tell that these tubes lacked filters or even an exposed head for lighting. They weren’t cigarettes at all. They were fingers. Severed human fingers.

  There were ten in total, just as Peter—if not for his sudden fright— might expect: eight lengthy digits and two opposable thumbs. But the only thing these thumbs now opposed was their onlooker’s comprehension. Peter thought that all the digits must be artificial, crafted from some kind of flesh-coloured clay. They were certainly realistic, but it was their meaning in the context of the display that unsettled him most. He recalled what his wife had said earlier, just before he’d done his childish flit, about how art involved challenging existing understandings.

  And what was this work of art saying to Peter?

  It wasn’t finished with him yet. Behind the half-full pint glasses and the packet of severed fingers was a betting slip, filled out with the date of a meeting, the name of its circuit, and the time of a race. The betting slip was intact…unlike the horse scattered beyond it.

  Surely this was also just a model. The way the creature had been ripped apart was grisly, but shouldn’t be taken seriously. The miniature beast’s severed neck only glistened red like that because it had received an application of special paint. Its legs looked like they’d been amputated by some deranged equine surgeon, but of course this could be explained by the way the artist had—with some skill, admittedly— sculpted the creature’s angular limbs.

  Despite his escalating confusion, Peter vividly recalled having once been a betting man. In his early days, before starting his business, he’d wanted to get rich quick, like many guys of his generation. And with a young man’s weaknesses, coupled with the unfailing persuasiveness of booze, he’d regularly backed the gee-gees, rarely winning yet becoming addicted to the variable buzz it offered. For every £100 gambled, he’d lost about half, and it was several years later, after meeting Patricia, that he’d put an end to such foolish activity. He’d got his head down at the store he’d opened, then the yard he’d hired, and finally the factory he’d bought and developed into his empire.

  He glanced again at the severed fingers boxed up beside the half-full pint glasses. Then, for some reason, he started thinking about how ruthlessly he’d kept hold of the fortune he’d earned during his career. He was aware that he was worth at least a million pounds, the sum derived from canny investments rather than wasting cash on what he’d always regarded as trivialities. His wife had often complained about this thrifty nature, which he’d developed early in marriage, but she must surely now agree that, with their large comfortable home and all the luxuries they could offer the children, he’d been right all along. And if this had required him to keep a firm hand on the family purse, well, that had been for the best, hadn’t it?

  Peter looked away from the deceptively simple work of art in front of him. Edging backwards, he reluctantly conceded that the thoughts he’d just been entertaining—each involving cutting insights into the way he conducted his life—had been prompted by this installation.

  He moved on, unwilling to admit that his wife and the other artists might have a purpose in what they were trying to achieve here.

  According to the map, the next installation was located beyond a bend formed by dense foliage huddled between trees like slumbering beasts. Moving along the dirt-strewn path, he thought he spotted something like an animal among the greenery up ahead, but slowing to observe he noticed nothing other than swaying twigs and variegated leaves, captured in the dance of a fitful breeze. He closed his eyes, shaking his head. In his mind’s eye, the after-image of what he only thought he’d seen settled the matter. He knew that no squirrel or fox could grow that big and would be unable to survive with so much flesh lacking from exposed bones…

  Just a hallucination, then, brought on by the weird light occupying the depths of the woodland. More and more trees seemed to stand around him, like armed sentinels prepared for action. Peter stole forwards, growing fearful about time passing and a bleak evening descending before he was ready for it.

  After reorienting himself, he spotted the second new artwork marked on the guide he still held in one hand. After approaching it, this one immediately disturbed him, even more than the beer-and-betting installation. It consisted of a large doll’s house which appeared to have been extracted from a terraced row of them. In fact, Peter knew this was the case, because the property, here rendered no higher than his waistline, was an exact facsimile of his mistress’s pad in Sheffield, of the home of luscious Geraldine, whose body was amazing and mind weak enough to tolerate a lover’s absence, in exchange for regular bribes (all tax-deductible, as Peter’s discreetly corrupt accountant had arranged).

  In front of this miniaturised building was a pair of round objects mounted side by side on a vertical pole. Curiosity overruling his bewilderment, Peter stepped forwards to examine these two objects, which were located in a specific position in front of the tiny house. The longer he thought about it, the more he believed he was supposed to look into them like binocular eyepieces. There was an inch-wide gap between the two, and if he brought his face close to the pair, he might e
asily glance through.

  And then despite his mounting disquiet, that was what he did.

  He realised at once that this was like using a pair of binoculars or the viewfinder of some clever digital device. It was clever because, although the copy of his mistress’s house had been vacant to the naked eye, it appeared through the makeshift lenses to be alive with furtive activity. A car—his own; the silver Mercedes he’d driven since his fortieth birthday—was parked in front of the property, looking translucent and ethereal. Peter thought he could see straight through the vehicle, but then as his heart rate ascended to an unprecedented speed, something else claimed his attention: a movement inside the building, at an upstairs window between suggestively parted curtains.

  This was the master bedroom, of course—always the reason he travelled south on unofficial business. His wife had never suspected what he was up to, assuming that one of his distributors was based there. That was true, but these days little business was done in person that couldn’t be achieved electronically. In matters of animal lust, however, the face-to-face arrangement was still necessary. And now, for the first time from the outside, Peter observed his licentious activity.

  Two almost transparent figures had started fumbling inside the gloomy bedroom, both unconcerned about being observed. That was understandable, because Peter recalled that the real property in Sheffield—the one on which this version had certainly been modelled—looked onto a wasteland which lacked an elevated position from which to view its upper level. Then the illicit lovers started making out on the bed, flinging discarded clothing to and fro as their coupling grew ever more frantic, ever more violent (not something Peter had ever enjoyed with Patricia), and then fast, furious, reckless, ruthless.

  He knew he shouldn’t keep watching, but Peter was dismayed to realise that he was sexually aroused. However, that was when the two people—miniature versions of himself and Geraldine, even though Peter had realised that he looked plumper in the nude than he’d imagined—started dissolving.

  It wasn’t only the lovers affected in this way. Peter’s faded car, parked at an imaginary kerb in front of the property, also developed a watery appearance. No sooner had the on-looking Peter detected this change than the couple on the bed turned to squelchy nothingness. The Mercedes had similarly become a sloshing puddle in the roadside. It was as if a wash of something corrosive had just swept across the building, cleansing it of impurities, of dishonest filth.

  Peter pulled away from the two circular objects through which he’d observed this liquid vision. Seconds later, however, he darted forwards again, poked his head around to view the other side of the globes, and felt his heartbeat step up its assault on reason.

  The two things he’d been looking through were eyeballs. The rear of them had been scooped out, presumably to allow the artwork’s crackpot creator to insert special lenses—the sort on which cunning electronic images could be projected, giving an illusion of life in the now dead house.

  Peter looked at the tiny property, and then glanced back at those weeping eyes. Their irises were incredibly blue, as fragile as an autumn sky. If the sheen of moisture coating them was supposed to represent tears, that was surely just more of the cunning artist’s trickery.

  But who could know so much about Peter’s life to conjure such a revealing case study, hinting at truths beyond his capacity to absorb?

  He floundered backwards, feeling afraid. Branches raked across his flesh as his feet lashed between tangles of bramble and knee-high nettles. For a moment, Peter thought he’d spotted another distorted creature lurking in this place of revelations, but then struggling to marshal his body—his heart rate racing, his perception stark and unruly—he noticed nothing of the sort. Indeed, the only things up ahead were trees, trees, trees. Their soldierly regimentation helped him steady his thoughts, which had threatened to rip holes in his reeling psyche.

  But he could finally think to some useful purpose. Those had been his wife’s eyes in that last work of art, and Peter knew he’d been tricked into observing himself through them. The experience had been very unpleasant. Recollection of his flabby, white backside thrusting against a woman who lacked sufficient mental acumen to protest had frankly disgusted him. He realised that he’d only ever been aware of the surface of his lover Geraldine, just as he’d only been trivially aware of himself. His visit here today, however, had forced him to peer behind what he now recognised as a mask of delusion. And underneath was a childlike chaos induced by rigid parents, firmed up at a series of poor comprehensive schools, reinforced by all the power he’d achieved in adulthood, and now as deeply rooted as solid trees sunk in fragile earth.

  Moments later, Peter struck one of these, and as a chill scuttled down his spine, he was forced to glance at the floor. The path was gone, but after looking up again, he realised that, in his blind panic a second ago, he hadn’t got lost, after all.

  The third artwork, the one detailed on the map’s extra page, stood squarely in front of him.

  Why wasn’t this located on the man-made route, or on any part of the art trail planned by the organisers? The question puzzled Peter, but less so as he struggled forwards to observe the final entry in what had proved to be an alarming experience. He’d learned significant things from the last two displays—about himself and his unacceptable behaviour…but what was he supposed to take from this last one?

  He understood at some primordial level, where the darkest material stirred, that the three new works of art had been crafted specifically for him. This was a ludicrous conclusion, going against everything he’d always believed about a cause-and-effect existence, but he nonetheless believed it. The realisation scared him, but he believed it; he believed it. After all, what else could he think when confronted by this?

  It was as tall as him, but broader. It appeared to be constructed from a random collection of bones, pitched at curious angles in relation to one another and each dripping clots of gore. Amid tangles of sinew stretched across its slipshod skeleton, innumerable objects were clustered, some clean and new in appearance—items of domestic service such as an iron and a duster—and others grubby and old-fashioned, creased and tainted by age. In this second category were faded photographs of people young and old, each of whom Peter thought he recognised. Higher up, suspended over this collection of objects, a pair of breasts was hung, both heavy with mother’s milk. To one side, eyes not unlike those Peter had seen in the previous installation were grouped between luscious lips, a narrow nose, rosy cheeks and pointed ears. All these facial features were, however, in the wrong order. But then Peter’s attention was drawn by the makeshift figure’s limbs. Its hands would have been better served by the lifelike fingers seen in the first artwork he’d examined earlier, because none of the digits resembled anything other than knotty twigs, gnarled and stained by moss. Each grasped creakily in the gathering wind. Below these appendages, feet shuffled with a timber-like tread, except that they were nothing of the sort: they were wooden stumps, drilled into the soil: unmovable, resolute, strategically placed.

  Peter edged forwards to review the whole in all its beguiling detail. It was beautiful; he could acknowledge that much. Up close, with the powers of perspective diminished, standing in its proximity was like spending time with a first sweetheart, when a man was young and had all his life in front of him, before the rot of experience had turned the hopes every foolish person held in their hearts to mushy, unappealing pulp.

  “I’m sorry, ” he said to nobody at all, and then whirled to examine the rest of the wood in which art had done its worst to transform him. “Oh, forgive me, Patricia. Forgive me. ”

  “I do, darling, ” said a voice in reply, and Peter immediately recognised it as his wife’s. While looking away from the final artwork, he’d spotted the path from which he’d strayed after taking fright a while ago. But although he spotted another work of art—this one involving a factory of sorts, rendered human-like by the addition of his own features among its humdrum bri
ckwork—he realised that the voice hadn’t come from the art trail, after all.

  It had come from behind him.

  “Now you’ve found me and see me, ” the voice went on, its timbre rigid and creaking, “I’ll take you where you need to be. ”

  And when the figure he’d been observing only moments earlier—not the final artwork, after all—took his hand and started leading him away, deeper into the kind of woodland in which Peter knew he’d always secretly lived, he was reluctant to turn…and look again at Patricia as she now appeared to him.

  THE LURKER

  ———

  “You’d better believe it, honey. ”

  That was the way Kate had responded to many questions I’d asked, her rich American accent always melting my jaded London heart. We’d regularly come on walking holidays to the Cotswolds, and Gloucester had been one of her favourite cities—a place in which she could enrich her outsider’s passion for all things historically English.

  And now there was Pam. Who wasn’t Kate, of course, because my wife was dead.

  Pam had never really been interested in outdoor pursuits, though I suppose at my age, you shouldn’t be picky. I’d met her in a supermarket, our trolleys colliding at the top of two aisles, and we’d got talking like only the bereaved did: warily and yet mindful of friends’ well-meaning platitudes about life going on. Then we’d had coffee together, then a meal, and before we knew it, we were dating.

  The weekend break in the Cotswolds had been my idea, a way of placating my doctor who’d told me to take some exercise to get my cholesterol in order. It was true that since Kate’s death I’d been neglecting my fondness for walking, so I’d put the trip to Pam one afternoon in Regent’s Park. She’d agreed, saying walking and sightseeing weren’t really her thing, but that she’d give it a go. She was fifty-six and I was nearly sixty. It wasn’t as if we had time on our side or the luxury of choice. Either we made a serious go at this…or we didn’t.